Web Search APIs from Yahoo! Search

We’re shutting down this service in April 2011. For further details, please see the Deprecated Services blog post.

Yahoo! Web Search Web Services let you tap into the power of Yahoo! Search technologies from within other sites, applications, and environments. Use the Web Search Web Services to query Yahoo! systems without leaving your website or interface and incorporate the results in your applications.

How Do I Get Started?

1. Read the online documentation and FAQs.

2. Get an Application ID

   To access Web Search APIs from Yahoo! Search web services, you will need to get an application ID. Like a browser's User-Agent string, the Application ID uniquely identifies your application and has no effect on rate limiting.

3. Download the SDK

   The development kit includes BSD licensed examples and libraries for various languages: Perl, Python and PHP, Java, JavaScript, and Flash.

Web Search Services

Overview

• Context Search

  The Contextual Web Search service returns web pages matching a context-based query, helping you make your searches more powerful.

• Related Suggestion

  The Related Suggestion service returns suggested queries to extend the power of a submitted query, providing variations on a theme to help you dig deeper.

• Spelling Suggestion

  The Spelling Suggestion service returns suggested spelling for a given term.

• Web Search

  The Web Search service allows you to search the Internet for web pages by submitting queries via REST.

Rate Limits

The Yahoo! Web Services are limited to 5,000 queries per IP address per day and to noncommercial use. See information on rate limiting.

Terms of Use

Please see our Usage Policy to learn about acceptable uses and how to request additional queries.

Support & Community

The Yahoo! Web Services are discussed on the yws-search-web mailing list.